We spend all our lives here doing surrealism.

(Simone Collinet, letter to Denise Levy, April 18th, 1924)

Transform the world, said Marx. Change life, said Rimbaud. For us, these two imperatives are one in the same.

“Transform the world, said Marx. Change life, said Rimbaud. For us, these two imperatives are one in the same”. Of these two ambitions of the surrealist program, which Breton evoked in 1935, only the second may have been realized. Yet, even if these were not achieved, or were only partially so, these two imperatives maintain and convey to us the vitality of a shared belief: the belief that language is capable of acting upon things – what one might call its performativity.

Pamphlets, appeals, addresses, posters, manifestos, letters, poetry and essays: surrealism is an active library, striving to engage with the clamour and chaos of the world. Open to all the winds of a life which one wishes to be denser and more intense – “a poetic life”, wrote Aragon in Le paysan de Paris, “a real life”, declared Breton in the opening of the Manifesto.

One hundred years after the publication of this foundational text, this exhibition seeks to unpack the Surrealist library, bringing it into dialogue with visual works of the past and present, which share a commitment to the performativity of forms to impact sensibility and reinvent our presence in the world.

Both at the origin and the heart of this project, there is a real library, that of Simone Collinet, to whom this exhibition pays tribute. Born Simone Kahn in 1897, she married André Breton from 1921 to 1929, was a far-left political activist in the 1930s alongside Michel Collinet, whom she married in 1939, as well as a gallerist in Saint-Germain-des-Prés from the late 1940s to the mid-1960s. Simone Collinet embodies and traverses the great surrealist adventure in its three main aspects: poetic, political, and visual.

This exhibition aims to retrace and revive this adventure by bringing together three types of works: a collection of artworks and documents from Surrealism and its surroundings (its ancestry, margins, and various branches); works by contemporary artists that echo surrealism; and a production of various ephemera to be collected and taken away, including pamphlets, flyers and leaflets, which reawaken the surrealist corpus and project.

The show unfolds through a journey designed around five spaces, leading us from the public to the intimate, from the exterior to the interior, from lightness to obscurity: on the ground floor we find, La rue and La galerie; and on the upper floor, La bibliothèque, Le musée and Le cabinet.

(Text by Emmanuel Tibloux)